1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a system for creating and editing a multimedia program which defines the details of a multimedia application, and more particularly, to a method and system for use in such a multimedia editing system for presenting available media resources or materials such as moving videos, still pictures, audios and texts.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A multimedia computer program or a scenario comprises a title name, a running time of the title, a screen layout which defines the windows in which a video, a still picture and a text are displayed, the media materials used in the title, and a schedule for manipulating the media materials. The created scenario is replayed by either the multimedia editing system that created the scenario or any micro-based multimedia player system provided with resources necessary for replaying the scenario.
The media resources or materials are typically used in the following formats for each of the media material types: i.e., MPEG(Moving Picture Experts Group)-1 and -2, AVI (Audio Video Interleave: the file format for Microsoft's video for Windows), and DV formats for the video type; JPEG (Joint Photographic Coding Experts Group), BMP (the standard bit-mapped graphics format used in the Windows environment), and PhotoCD (a file format for storing digital photographs) formats for the still picture type; and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and Wave formats for the audio type. Conventional multimedia editing or authoring systems generally display all of prepared media materials at a time. In editing a multimedia program, the user selects one out of the displayed media materials to assign to a layout window either provided by a prepared template or specified by the user if the selected media material is of a visual type (i.e., any of the video, picture and text types) and to assign to a desired scenario time (or a time measured from the beginning of the scenario) to start replaying the selected material if the selected media material is of the audio type. This process is repeated till a desired scenario is obtained.
However, all the media types of the prepared media materials are not necessarily supported by the multimedia editing system or a multimedia player system on which a scenario being edited is to be played. Even media materials supported in this sense are not always permitted to be used in the course of scenario editing depending on design thought of the multimedia editing system.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a method of presenting or displaying only media materials permitted to the current conditions with respect to the window type of a window to which a material is about to be assigned, media types that have been used so far and so on to facilitate the selection of media material.
It is another object of the invention to provide a multimedia editing system which displays only media materials permitted to the current conditions with respect to the window type of a window to which a material is about to be assigned, media types that have been used so far and so on to facilitate the selection of media material.